Someone Who Isn't Me, Danuta Kot [good books to read for adults TXT] 📗

faces that looked middle-aged from childhood, not helped by the scarf that partly covered her faded blonde hair and was tied firmly under her chin. There was no car visible on the road, so she must have walked from nearby, from… Kay looked round. Probably from the cottage along the road? ‘Hello?’ Kay said. Milo, ever helpful, growled from behind her legs.

‘Excuse me, but what are you doing?’ The woman’s eyes were sharp with suspicion. Who would have thought Sunk Island ran a neighbourhood watch?

‘I’m your new neighbour,’ Kay said. ‘I’m moving in here for a while.’

The woman’s face remained suspicious. ‘A while?’

‘Yes.’ Kay held out her hand. ‘Kay McKinnon.’

The woman touched it briefly then let it fall. ‘Ford. Catherine Ford. I live in the cottage along there. I don’t mean to intrude, but we have to be careful. It’s very isolated here, and the police never patrol. Just the other night, I went for a walk and I saw a couple of young men in a car, a four by four, just driving round. Strangers. Looking for trouble. They passed me a couple of times. I called the police and I let them see me do it. Not that the police did anything. They never come out here, or not until it’s too late.’

‘Too late?’

‘You didn’t hear? They found a body down by the banks of the estuary this morning, near Spragger Drain sluice. No one’s told us anything, of course.’

Kay wondered who ‘us’ were. Sunk Island was barely populated apart from a small number of scattered houses like hers, and a couple of farms. A body down by the estuary. She felt her heart sink, and told herself it didn’t have to be anything to do with this place. It didn’t have to be anything at all. People fell into the water all the time – and the estuary was treacherous.

Catherine Ford’s voice went on, ‘… and someone nearly got killed before that, earlier in the week, a car, speeding, no one from round here. They nearly knocked a woman down. We’ve had a lot of trouble, you know. Cars at night. Motorbikes. It’s getting worse.’

Kay was about to ask what kind of crime there was, out here in the back of beyond, then she realised she was being naive. This wouldn’t be petty, opportunistic crime; this would be organised. Farms and old buildings held valuable stuff. There would be old lead piping, lead in the roof flashings, farm equipment in the scattered locations she’d seen on the map, and the only protection would be what people installed themselves.

As if picking up on her thoughts, Catherine Ford looked at Milo. ‘Is he a good guard dog?’

‘He barks when strangers are around.’ Kay hadn’t thought about needing a guard dog. Milo would bark, but if he got scared he came to Kay for protection, not vice versa.

‘That’s better than nothing. You know, this used to be such a lovely house. Hettie – Mrs Laithwaite – was ill for a long time. She couldn’t keep up with it, but she wasn’t going to move. She was quite determined.’

‘It’s not the best house if you’re not independent.’ Kay found it hard to imagine a sick old woman surviving there, though she could understand the impulse not to leave. Her nightmare was spending her last years in a care home with hoists and commodes and indifferent care workers seeing to her needs. She hoped someone would do her the kindness of chucking her off a high cliff before that happened.

‘That said, she did have her family helping – they really looked after her. You don’t always get that, these days.’

‘That’s true,’ Kay said non-committally. She wasn’t up for a young people today conversation.

‘The district nurse came, of course, but family’s best.’

‘Yes,’ Kay murmured.

‘We thought it was going to be sold. We don’t want a holiday let, standing empty half the year.’

‘They didn’t tell you what their plans were for the house?’

The other woman considered Kay’s words as if she was searching for hidden criticism. ‘You don’t like to ask. Not when someone has… passed.’

Kidney stone.

‘No,’ Kay said neutrally. ‘The estate agent told me they plan to sell in the spring. The family.’

‘Well, that’s more than anyone has told me.’ Catherine Ford sounded a bit huffy, and Kay decided it was time to end the conversation. She had a lot to do.

‘Well, thanks for—’

‘If you need help, any time, here’s my number. We have a kind of telephone tree to get people out. Don’t rely on your mobile – the signal’s poor. And you won’t get a decent Wi-Fi connection. You’ll be on your own here. At night,’ Catherine Ford added.

Kay wondered if the woman was deliberately trying to frighten her. It was a good job she wasn’t the nervous type. Did she need to worry? Surely anything worth taking from this house must have gone weeks ago while it was standing empty. She wasn’t here permanently. It was nothing to do with her. Despite these self-reassurances, she found herself looking round at the deserted landscape with a shiver. Mentally, she cursed Catherine Ford.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she said briskly, to herself as much as to the other woman. The first drops of the threatened rain were starting to fall and to Kay’s relief, Catherine Ford decided to leave her to it. Kay watched her as she vanished through the gate. You’ll be all on your own. The sun had disappeared and it was almost dark – time to get herself settled in.

Shaking off the unease the conversation had left her with, she called Milo away from where he was burrowing in the soil. His coat was damp and muddy, and she got a whiff of an unpleasant smell – organic, but not quite, rather like the smell of the chemical toilets they used in basic campsites. She sighed. ‘What have you found?’ He wagged happily, his tongue lolling. She’d have to give him a bath before she let him loose in the house.

First